Johnny Moore

Johnny Moore acknowledges that he faced challenges as a young black man pursuing a career in banking. But he’s just as quick to mention advocates who helped his rise, most particularly John Evans, the former president of National Bank of Commerce’s Memphis region who first hired Moore in 1992.

“We had an understanding,” says Moore. “He had a specific job for me to do and I had the skills to do it. But if he was only going to hire me for that job, I wasn’t going to take it. To his credit, he moved me around in a couple of areas and, before he retired, to the commercial line of business. No African American had been in our metropolitan lending group. Ever. I couldn’t be average. I had to develop fast.” Since 2009, Moore has occupied the same position Evans once did. (NBC and SunTrust merged in 2004.)

Moore grew up in Orange Mound, one of five siblings in a two-parent household. As he recalls, there were photos of two men in nearly every neighborhood home he visited: Dr. Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. “As a kid,” says Moore, “I was kind of sheltered from [the Civil Rights movement]. There weren’t a lot of political views in our house. My parents were just trying to provide a decent living and raise five kids. But I knew about the sanitation strike. You may not have known all the details, but you knew the importance of having a union to protect your rights.”

A defensive end at Rhodes College (where he graduated in 1988 with a degree in business administration), Moore took that first job with the same competitive edge that earned him all-conference honors with the Lynx. “If you compete against me, I’m gonna try to win,” he stresses. “That’s how I’m wired. Competing in athletics has spilled over into my professional career.”

The culture of the banking industry has changed over Moore’s quarter-century in the business, but this only means new challenges for young people of color — any color — interested in building a career. “There are more African Americans in the business,” notes Moore, “and there’s more African-American representation on boards. We’re making progress. But there aren’t a lot of African-American market presidents.” (SunTrust has three regional presidents in Tennessee.)

A finance degree — particularly one in accounting — is all but required today for a meaningful career in banking. “People are getting into banking every day,” says Moore. “You’re going to need a 3.5 GPA from a good school to be hired, white or black. It’s competitive. And at some point, you’re going to have to sell. How well are you interacting with people, especially people of a different race. Given the distribution of wealth, you’ve got to be able to cross over. There’s competition; more foreign students are competing for those jobs.”

Moore smiles in reflecting on the state of the Civil Rights movement today. How easy it might be to agree that we’ve made it, having elected the country’s first African-American president. But there’s still pioneering to do, still new doors to open.

“Even in 2018,” says Moore, “there are a lot of things in my career where I’ve been the first African American to do it. There are so many frontiers where we haven’t cracked the surface yet. It’s hard to do. People are not just hateful, they’re not. But people are creatures of habit.

“If you’re in a position to hire people, you’re going to hire people you’re comfortable with. You hang out with them at church, you go to the country club, you go to sporting events. It becomes your lens. It’s hard to get outside your comfort zone. How do we get people to mix, to learn from each other, knock down stereotypes?”

As for the future of the movement, Moore says we must look toward the executive suite, but start in the classroom. “We’ve got to figure out how to get more African Americans in senior roles,” he says. “Then when you’re hiring, you’ve got people from different cultures and backgrounds making those choices. It would be a more balanced approach to developing people.

“It’s a problem of haves and have-nots. When you have people working two and three jobs just to provide for their family, then nobody’s there to take care of the kids. The kids have no framework for how to be successful. If they can’t read by third grade, the likelihood of their being a concern later on is very high.

“It’s not so much racism,” he continues. “That may exist. But how do we help people get a decent wage, develop a family structure, provide kids with guidance they need? So they can enhance their educational skills and compete in today’s world. The only way you can go from a ‘have-not’ to a ‘have’ is with an education.”

Moore emphasizes that careers can be built without a college education, but there must be a foundation. “There are a lot of jobs that pay well,” he says. “When I call a plumber or an HVAC guy, they’re not cheap. But you’ve got to have the basic education to gain the qualifications to be a licensed plumber. College isn’t going to happen for everybody, but if they have a fundamental education that allows them to work a single job and develop their family, that’s how you change.”